A writer walks through a suburb of a desert city. He finds that art, memory, souvenirs and tourism, history, dam-building and citrus trees have something to do with each other. This is the second of five essays. →

A writer walks through a suburb of a desert city. He finds that art, memory, souvenirs and tourism, history, dam-building and citrus trees have something to do with each other. This is the first of five essays. →

Pop music, on its own terms, is often an ephemeral pleasure, but A Mess of Help: From the Crucified Soul of Rock N’ Roll shows us how to look at it and then through it to things that really matter, the words that could be, in so many songs, a message from outside our narrow selves, from someone who loves us. →

In The Circle Dave Eggers reveals how present technological advances might be used in efforts to transcend current limits of what we know, what we hope for, what we must do, and what it means to be a human being. →

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a love story, albeit a scary one. And the beautiful adventure of love Amirpour portrays is one where the person beside you may be different than you imagined. They may be much stronger, they may destroy you, and you may destroy them. →

…it wasn’t until I experienced for myself the extent of the repetition and revision of painting the same few objects over and over again—the bones, the flowers, the mountains, the doors—that I understood the collective effect of a long career and close collaboration in not only documenting, but defining a place and time. →

Despite its tenth-century trappings, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a film made with eyes firmly fixed on the troubles of contemporary Japanese life and the deep slide of the Japanese Miracle into the dreary doldrums of the Lost Two Decades. →

Interstellar extends the tradition of science fiction films that underscore the moral condition of the human within a technologically savvy narrative, and it is the antithesis of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. →

Absent a flashy visual style, Citizenfour may seem like an easy movie to make, but Laura Poitras’ “privileged access” to Edward Snowden reminds viewers that the pursuit of this controversial story was propelled by her strong ideology and her uniqueness, unteachable in film school. →

Steeped in the tradition of the flâneur, David Kendall explores how spatial, economic and design initiatives, as well as participatory practices, can combine to encourage social and spatial interconnections or reveal dissonance in cities. →

Watching The Walking Dead through the categories of existential and ethical horror reflects what we are scared of when we turn off the television and accounts for why we seek out the scares in the first place. →

Democratic, yet class-haunted—as all the service professions are—political, but neutral ground, you can talk about anything in a barbershop, even in Tajikistan. And while you’re sitting there, everyone else is doing the same thing, everywhere around this planet. Sitting, safe for the moment, ready for the blade. →

A review of Monica Maristain’s new book Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations, an interweaving of biographical narrative and interviews conducted with Bolaño, a man of contradictions, both farouche and loving. →

ArtEverywhereUS.org answers: what about those for whom exposure to art isn’t readily available, or those whose negligible or nonexistent interest in art prevents them from seeking out opportunities to view it? →

My wider life experiences—Bugs Bunny and History of Italian Opera and hating piano lessons and studying art history and and being ashamed of my elitism and being fiercely protective of the possibilities of art—don’t displace my experience of opera: they augment it. →

If you had a habit like that, a pleasurable habit, but without the cost or cancer, a habit that wouldn’t kill you, a habit whose only downside was that it prevented you from enjoying opera, you’d keep it, right? →

“I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.” ~ Andrew Wyeth →

The hope of Hayao Miyazaki as discussed in Turning Point: 1997-2008, a collection of translated interviews, public statements, essays, etc., compiled from the years he directed Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle. →

“Mid-century Modern designers never expected their post-war homes to be temporary dwellings, replaced cheaply in just a few decades. But they also could not have pictured that the light of those floor-to-ceiling windows and the open-concept floor plan would nurse a woman back to health from cancer.” →

The Great Railway Bazaar doesn’t try to distill any experience but the author’s own, and it does so with an artfulness that has the bite of a strong drink: in the end the buzz is worth the burn, even forty years after its release. →